The long path from person to product

In a distribution or warehousing operation, the most common working concept is “person-to-goods” order picking, which simply means that order pickers move to storage locations, often pushing or pulling carts and reading orders off paper. These pickers spend significant amounts of time walking between storage, and are then expected to decipher an order picking sheet. These operations spend lots of money and time and resources on those steps. Picking paths and storage locations evolve as inventory profiles change — and not always for the better.

The annual National Safety Council Congress & Expo has come and gone and one of the best take-aways from that event was the announcement of OSHA’s top ten most-cited safety violations for FY2015. None of the items on the list were especially surprising, except perhaps the numbers of citations, and all types of violations should give you cause to stop and think about how well you’ve done with safety in those areas.

The Great Game of Business: Gathering of the Games was held in St. Louis, Missouri from September 9 through 11. The Gathering of Games is the only practitioner-led conference in open-book management and Cisco-Eagle sent 4 employee-owners this year.

Rosemary Weiland, our Education and Training Administrator wrote this summary of what we learned this year.

What Does a Warehouse Management System Do?

A medium-sized chain of convenience stores once asked me to take a look at their Warehouse Management System (WMS) to see if it was time for an upgrade. After documenting all the functions it performed, we discovered that none of them could be described as serving warehouse activities. The system had lots of good purchasing functions—but offered nothing to support the actual warehouse.

There are all kinds of shelving options for typical loads, but what do you do with the really heavy, dense, or bulky items that just won’t work on conventional shelving, but that aren’t loaded on a pallet rack? Or things that aren’t big enough to store on pallet racks, but don’t fit into standard shelving? That’s where wide span bulk shelving comes into play. It’s similar to pallet rack, but built for hand-loaded case or piece storage.

More and more companies are adding various forms of robotics to their operations as they seek to improve productivity, enhance worker safety, and keep labor costs down. We recently spoke with Wes Garrett, Packaging Account Manager at FANUC America about robotics in the material handling industry. He provided some great information regarding cost of ownership, indicators robotics may benefit an operation, and trends in new technologies.

Ouch – those collisions have done some damage

In both cases, the guard rail has deformed. That’s good, because both guardrails have done their jobs and protected the people, equipment or facility structures behind them. On the other hand, you can see that the rail systems have been stressed and bent. One system is rigid steel guard rail and the other is flexible poly guard rail. Let’s see how they match up in form, function and lifetime cost.Read the rest of this entry »